Category Archives for "Wordpress"

If you have just started your own WordPress website or blog you are possibly looking for a great WordPress booking plugin or calendar, like the ones used on booking.com. A WordPress booking plugin allows you to add events and bookings to your site to make them easy to see by everyone who visits. In some instances, you can even add a plugin that allows visitors to add their events to the calendar for others to see. The only problem is that we are spoilt for choice. Throughout this article, we will take you through the pros and cons of some of the best calendar and booking plugins.

EventOn – WordPress Event Calendar Plugin

EventOn is a number one best selling WordPress booking plugin. EventOn uses a sleek tile layout, making all of your calendar events easy to see. This is a calendar that you can use for almost all of your needs, with a shortcode generator, event repeating options, maps and location information and social media share icons. You can even create events lists, making scheduling easy and efficient. Alternatively, you can create an event card when you have something special coming up; this allows you to add an image, a basic PayPal button and even offers directions to your event. Offering 200+ feature, customizable design, and browser responsiveness it is no wonder this is a best selling WordPress booking plugin. Once purchased you are given six months support with an option to extend to 12 months. From all reviews and feedback about the responsiveness and amazing ability to solve problems, we would suggest you take advantage of the extended help.

Calendarize it! For WordPress

Calendarize it! Is the most flexible and feature-rich WordPress booking plugin available. Calendarize it! has eight predefined layout templates which take the hassle out of creating your calendar and ensuring you don’t have to fight with shortcode just to get started. One great feature that Calendarize it! offers is for your visitors to create events from the front end, you can even charge visitors to create an event that they add to your calendar. When it comes to choosing WordPress booking plugin one of the things that you have to consider are the add-ons that the plugin offers, Calendarize it! offers hundreds of free and nominal fee add-ons allowing you to customize your calendar for your needs; payment options, community events, member profiles, a rate, and review option and even advertising banners. Everything you could need in a calendar can be found in this plugin and the add-ons it offers.

Bookly Booking Plugin

Bookly is a WordPress booking plugin that is suited for a business where you need appointments. This WordPress booking plugin has rich scheduling capabilities allowing a buffer around appointments, varying meeting times, and ability to sync with a Google Calendar. There is an unlimited number of staff, appointments, and services that you can offer within this plugin making it customizable to every business type and service. You can also customize the actual booking form with different colors and fields. You can also add the booking form to multiple pages or domains. Bookly also offers customizable payment options, where you can choose a different price point for various services or even different staff members. You can also utilize multiple secure payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, iDEAL, PayU. You can also book multiple appointments per session, and there is an option for transactional emails and text messages to be sent out to clients, and you can manage all of these activities online.

Team Booking

Team booking is a fantastic WordPress booking plugin because they decided not to reinvent the wheel with this plugin. It is completely synchronized with Google Calendar. This means that you use your Google Calendar to create blocks of time where you want the appointment or event to be placed, then as they are filled up by visitors your Google Calendar is automatically updated. This WordPress booking plugin gives you an unlimited amount of events that can be scheduled with different people and also an infinite number of individuals who want to attend the event or appointment. For some people, this fantastic integration is the bugbear of the plugin, as you actually have to have a Google account to use it. However, this is what it was designed for, so it really isn’t a drawback at all. The plugin also offers timezone selection and allows each of your service providers to plan their own schedule.

Booked – Appointment Booking

The Booked WordPress booking plugin is a simple appointment plugin. Allowing you to add as many calendars as you need and customize each calendar to suit each agent. Booked WordPress booking plugin lets users book appointments whether they are a registered or guest user on your site. One great feature is the ability to customize your booking form to allow you to collect any and all information you may need. The plugin is also customizable in terms of time slots available and color choice. The frontend calendar widget or shortcode can be displayed in a small or large format on your site, and it is extremely responsive on all devices. Booked makes it easy to view all of your appointments and lists pending appointments waiting for your approval, taking the stress of planning your day. All of this can be synced with iCal or Outlook, with the only drawback being that it is not a two-way sync.

Booked Payments with WooCommerce

Lifetime Updates and Support for 6-Months inc.

Calendar Feeds that Display your Appointments

If you are looking for a WordPress booking plugin that will suit your needs, event planning or appointment booking you are sure to find exactly what you are looking for in one of these extremely responsive, well supported and easy to use plugins. EventOn offers fantastic event cards to display on your site, while Calendarize it! offers easy to use layout templates. Or you might be looking for a more appointment based WordPress booking plugin. Bookly has great scheduling capabilities and is amazing if you are using different service agents, but Team Book is perfect for Google Calendar users. Check it out today and get your calendar running.

Setup Woocommerce

The most utilized plugin for WordPress eCommerce websites is WooCommerce. If you are running a store or have your own digital products if you set up WooCommerce, it is pretty easy for you to get started and maintaining, and if you want to expand it, it has lots of extensions.

Though it’s relatively simple compared to many other available solutions, WooCommerce needs to be configured to perform every function precisely. A few pages must be set up for the whole buying process to work correctly. This example will reveal how you can turn your WordPress website into a fully functional web shop.

After installing the plugin, it usually creates the necessary pages. But sometimes issues like a conflict with the theme or any of the other plugins arise and those pages don’t get created automatically. In this situation, you have to set up the WooCommerce pages yourself. Otherwise, your store won’t be operational, and buyers won’t be able to purchase. These are the most relevant pages you must have, to get WooCommerce up and running properly.

Cart

Checkout

My account

Cart: When a visitor clicks add to cart on a product it’s gets added to the shopping cart. Every product he wants to acquire first goes to the shopping cart. You can conceive of the cart like the basket or trolley we use at supermarkets to put all the products in it. When the buyers go to the shopping cart page, it will show all the goods they added in the cart and from there they could remove it if they want and increase or decrease the quantity of each item.

Checkout: This is the final step of the purchase, and is where the customer input the payment details and pay for the goods. Similar to the cash counter at real stores, it works the same way. The buyers, if given a choice, can choose from multiple payment options. If you want, you can use a coupon code field on this page as well.

My account: This page is the account page of a buyer and isn’t strictly necessary for the store to be fully operational, but having this page is the usual way of doing it. This page makes it much easier for buyers to check their previous orders and keep track of their info.

Having the cart and checkout pages is necessary. If your store’s shopping cart and checkout buttons don’t work, it is a need to check if these pages are present from the ‘All Pages’ tab and if you can’t see these pages you have to create them. Now setting these pages up isn’t that complex, and you don’t have to be a code wizard to do this. To guide you through how to configure the WooCommerce pages, I have made a step by step guide. Just follow it, and you will have them done in no time.

Setup Woothemes Cart:

Click ‘Add New’ under Pages tab. Give a page title and paste ‘[woocommerce_cart]‘ on it. Don’t copy the inverted commas, just from one bracket to the other. Then click publish.

Checkout:

Similar to the last step create a new page and paste ‘[woocommerce_checkout]’ without the inverted commas. Next, just click publish.

My account:

As it was with the earlier step go to ‘Add New’ under Pages and paste ‘[woocommerce_my_account]’ and click publish.

Now that you have these pages created you just have to point to them from the WooCommerce settings. It’s easy, and you just have to follow these steps:

First, go to ‘Settings’ tab under WooCommerce and click ‘Checkout.’

Next step is to scroll down, and you will see the ‘Cart Page’ and ‘Checkout’ fields just under ‘Checkout Pages.’ Then Select the pages you created earlier on both fields, scroll down and click ‘Save changes.’

Finally, we need to The final step is to go to the ‘Accounts’ tab, in the ‘My Account Page’ field select the page you created in the previous steps, that is the account page.

Don’t have the payment methods set up yet? Do it from ‘Checkout Options’ which is on the ‘Checkout’ tab.

When you have done these steps, you should be able to set up woocommerce pages without any extra trouble correctly. Now you just need to add products and they are finally ready to be sold!

As the saying goes ‘an image is worth a thousand words’. Having youtube videos in your posts makes it more rich and users become more engaged to watch videos that can describe or show something more vividly rather than reading about it. But most of the time users get confused about embedding youtube videos the way they want to. I am about to show you a few easy ways of how to embed youtube videos in WordPress posts.

There are two methods when it comes to, how to embed youtube videos in wordpress posts. One is simple as 1,2,3 and the other with more customization options involve a tiny amount of coding. With the following steps on how to embed a youtube video is going to be much easier than you can imagine.

The simple way:

1. Go to the youtube video’s page you want to embed. I am using an example video in the following. Than copy the link.

2. Now paste it in the post editor.

3. In seconds the video will load on page and ready for users to view.

The downside of this method is that you can’t change the alignment and the resolution.

Customized way:

1. Go to the youtube video’s page and click ‘share’. You can see three options: Share, Embed and Email. Click on ‘Embed‘. Then you will see a line of code just below. Copy the full code.

2. Now paste the full line of code while you are in the ‘Text‘ mode of the post editor. Make sure you are in the ‘Text’ mode otherwise the code won’t work.

3. After pasting the code move back to ‘Visual‘ editor, there you can see the video.

4. By default the video size will be 560X315. If you want to change it’s resolution it’s a very simple edit. Head back to ‘Text’ mode and in the embed code change the ‘width‘ and ‘height‘ values according to your needs.

5. If you want to center the video simply go to ‘Text’ editor and add ‘<center>‘ just before the beginning of <iframe> tag. And add </center> just after the last <iframe> tag.

With the <center> tags the video will be precisely centered on page.

After doing this few a times you should be able to get the hang of this method. Among the two described methods of how to embed youtube videos in WordPress posts, I personally suggest using this one mostly because of the customization options it gives you.

So the next time you want to embed a youtube video in your wordpress website, you know how to do it like a pro. Having appropriate videos in your posts will give users a much better experience and they will become more engaged and return to your website.

With today’s web 2.0 standards every website needs a contact form. A contact form let’s your users to engage themselves more with your website and stay in touch. And if you are running an online business than a contact form is a must have feature.

There are many wordpress contact form plugins available to use both free and premium ones. Some of the highest rated ones include Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Fast Secure Contact Form, Contact Buddy, and Ninja Forms. Among these Contact Form 7 is one of the most highly used and it’s free as well without any upgrade plans, so you have all the features in your hand to deploy.

Contact Form 7 is very easy to configure and run compared to many other contact plugins. It’s very light weight in terms of resources for your hosting account, as a result your page won’t have any extra loading time or lag.

Though Contact Form 7 is easy to use and maintain, one biggest problem of it is the design. The form design that comes with it appears very plain and it isn’t device responsive. Meaning on cell phone and tablets the form fields don’t auto resize which can be problematic for users. If you are running a website with dynamic theme Contact Form 7’s average design layout very likely won’t blend in and the responsiveness issue adds more to it.

Now don’t worry a bit, luckily Contact Form 7 design can be modified and given a nice looking appearance and auto responsiveness functions with correct customizations. You don’t have to learn programming or anything else to do this. We have made a nice step by step tutorial to help you accomplish this.

Assuming you already have Contact Form 7 installed in your wordpress admin panel. In case you don’t already have it, just install it from ‘Add New’ under Plugins.

Next go to ‘Add New’ under ‘Plugins’. In the search bar write ‘simple custom css and js’ and search for it.

3. Now you can see the Simple Custom CS and JS plugin as shown in the picture below. Click ‘Install Now’.

4. Then when the installation is complete, which only takes a few seconds you have to activate the plugin in order for it to work. Click ‘Activate Plugin’.

5. After the plugin is active you will see ‘Custom CSS and JS’ on the left side of the admin panel. Put your mouse pointer on it and you can see more options. Click ‘Add Custom CSS’ from the options.

‘background-color’ refers to each fields background color. If you want to change it just replace the #eee color code with your own. But don’t delete ‘!important;’ text. Otherwise it will malfunction.

‘font-size’ refers to the size of the font in the fields. Just change the number text next to it for increase or decrease.

‘color’ refers the font color itself. If you want to have different color just change the ‘#222’ color code with your own color code.

To modify send button, customize the following elements under ‘.wpcf7-submit’:

‘color’ refers to the text color on the button. If you want anything different simply change the ‘#002060’ color code with the color code you want.

Font-size depicts the font size of the text on the send button. Simple change the number if you want smaller or larger font.

Border is the border of the button. If you want to increase it change it from 2px to more and vice versa. It currently has black color(#000). You can change it with your own as well.

Now the ‘Send’ button has hover effects too. It changes color when you hover the mouse pointer over it. To change the hover effect colors as well, just change the following under ‘.wpcf7-submit:hover{‘

background-color here means the color of the background during hover.

border-color also refers to the color during mouse pointer is over the button.

There you go! You now know how to modify Contact form 7. I hope you enjoyed the article and are well on your way to modify Contact Form 7 to your liking.

Educational WordPress themes

Every educational institute must have a good, well designed and well maintained website, and that is solved with Educational WordPress themes. Be it a school, college or university, having a nice website is essential for them as it reflects your institute’s success, importance and value. It has been noted that nowadays interaction between students and teachers through email and social networking websites has increased showing good results and better learning.

In fact you can see that the better the institution is, the better is its rating on web. But having good professional website being made can be really expensive. So how can you build cool website of your institute without spending a lot of money? Well, the answer is really simple: by getting a well suited WordPress theme! WordPress is the most popular and widely used platform for making websites, and the awesome thing about it is that a plethora of themes in many different categories are available out there. Most of the times, themes are especially designed to meet the specific requirements and functionality of a certain type of websites.

Apart from the availability of themes, a lot of plugins are also available, which further makes customizing a website really easy. These plugins can be used for enhancing your theme’s functionality, taking security measure to protect your website, increasing its usability or speeding it up etc. Having a good photo gallery about your institute and the life in it also attracts more students. Many portfolio plugins are present, which can help you display your images in a better way.

So if you are planning on creating a new educational website or you wish to revamp your old one, you should definitely check out pre-designed educational WordPress themes. A huge amount of educational themes is available and finding the good ones is not an easy task. So in order to help you find the best ones, without even spending your time, today we have a collection of some really amazing themes. Most of the themes in this collection are paid, but a few are also free of cost. Check them out and pick the ones you like the best!

Lexington WordPress Theme

Education Style WordPress Theme

Speed up WordPress

There is some secrets you need to know to speed up wordpress, and I’ll share what I did with IVYthemes in this article.
IVYthemes had a decent page load time, in most countries, but it wasn’t as snappy as I would like, and in some countries it was pretty slow, with a page load time of over 8 seconds for our homepage. This is actually pretty horrible, and there are studies done that states that anything above 3 seconds is unacceptable for most visitors, they give up and go away from your site. We of course want our visitors to stay as long as possible and have a great experience on our site, so getting the page load time down was a high priority for us. We managed to get below a 1 second load time on our homepage by doing the following tweaks:

So, how to speed up WordPress?

DNSThere are some options but first you should make sure your DNS is reliable. If your registrar don’t have stellar reputation for their DNS, then a service like Cloudflare would be a great option, they have a free account, which covers both great DNS, security and some speed optimizations as well, but we’ll get back to those later.

Improving your WordPress efficiency by even 10 percent won’t matter if your DNS is not reliable.

HostingNext is a good web host. There’s lots of poor choices out there, with badly managed, oversold shared hosting accounts. I already had this covered by hosting the site at Liquidweb, which I have good experience with from before, after trying a lot of hosting companies over the years. Check them out by clicking here.

ThemeThen you need a clean, no bloat theme. Thrive themes is my personal choice for this site, but Genesis is a widely used theme framework which is also a great option.

PluginsThe next area you should focus on, is unused and unneeded plugins. Keep only the plugins that you really need. And only the ones with with solid, proven code behind them that are actively supported. This prevents uneeded load requests and keeps your plugin list nice and tidy. (Yes, I’m a neat freak)
WordPress is reliable and stable, and it can handle 40 or more plugins if they are all the right ones. But it only takes one badly coded plugin to make your site slow or unstable, get it fixed now!

Image optimizing (automatically)

Yahoo! has a great image optimizer called Smush.it that will reduce the file size of an image drastically, while at the same time keeping the quality.

However, doing this one image at a time would be a pain in the ass, and take too much time. I’m a fan of automatization so using the free plugin WP-SmushIt was perfect for saving a lot of time! It does slow down uploading images a bit, but it’s still well worth it.

CachingWordPress origin caching can be done with several plugins, but the two plugins that is most recommended is WP Super cache and W3 Total Cache. WP Super cache is the easiest to use of those, and speeds up your website immensly, but W3 Total Cache is more advanced and has more possibilities, but keep in mind that many features are limited due to your server configuration and you need to sign up to external CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks), like Amazon S3, Akamai etc.

Which of them you’ll use, depends on how much configuration you want to do, what your server supports etc. I’ve used both on this site and got great results with both, but I’ve landed on W3 Total cache as it was the fastest of the two, but you can’t go wrong with either one in that regard. However, if you prefer the easiest option, you should go with WP Super Cache.

ToolsI use and recommend Pingdom Tools to check my site load time. I recommend doing one before you start optimizing wordpress, so you see where your coming from, and of course several times during optimization, so you can get inspired by the ever faster wordpress load times.

I hope you are inspired to speed up wordpress by this article, we all want a faster web experience.

Convert more of your traffic to revenue

If you’ve ever tried to earn revenue on your WordPress website, then you probably know that conversions are king. Website traffic is a good thing—but leveraging it to turn a profit is another ballgame entirely. There are many tools to convert more of your traffic.

Turning web traffic into revenue is a lot like closing a sale. There are a lot of elements to consider, and all of them need to be in the right place at the right time. Getting people to sign up for your mailing list, gathering numbers for text-blasts, attracting followers on social media, and selling products to online visitors are just a few of the many things that need to be done right if you’re hoping to turn larger profits on your ecommerce WordPress site.

Of course, every site and company will be different—so some parts of your strategy might differ from those used to convert traffic on other websites.

But with that being said, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the main, core principles don’t apply to your business too. There is an art to getting visitors to buy from you—and unless you can find a way to tap into this mentality, you’re going to end up frustrated and disappointed.

This website basically offers subscribers a wide range of different WordPress themes, plugins, and tools that are specifically designed with traffic conversion in mind. The themes are lightning fast, the plug-ins are smart and intuitive, and the mailing list tools are cutting-edge and easy to use.

If you’re thinking about overhauling your WordPress site in an effort to make it more profitable (or are thinking of building a new WordPress website and need a theme and some plug-ins), then I would definitely recommend ThriveThemes.com for several different reasons.

They focus specifically on conversion

According to this article on nngroup.com, users often leave web pages after 10 to 20 seconds.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with ecommerce statistics—but to put it simply, that’s not a very long time.

You don’t have hours to get customers to commit—and when they do decide to commit, you need to make the process fast, easy, and simple.

That’s why conversion-focused tools are so important. If you don’t focus on conversion, you’re simply going to lose the customer. It’s pure mathematics.

Their themes look amazing

The WordPress themes offered by Thrive Themes are beautiful (We use thrive themes ignition on our site). I understand that the main focus of these tools is to turn visitors into customers, but they really seem to make an effort to do this with style.

The layouts are clean, the tools are seamless, and the workflow within the builder is nearly perfect.

Giving your website a professional look is extremely important. If your site looks sloppy, then you’re going to be much more likely to lose customers—especially if you have any kind of competition to speak of.

But Thrive Themes offers themes and a builder that can really help to offset this challenge. Creating professional looking WordPress websites with these tools is surprisingly simple—and to be honest, the results are often very attractive.

Have a look at the best school for hypnosis in Norway: Hypnoseutdanning – For a great example of a site using Thrive themes.

They maintain an awesome blog filled with relevant news and ideas

Another awesome thing about ThriveThemes.com is that they maintain a blog on their website—and do a great job of it! If you’re looking for tips that’ll make you better at turning visitors into customers using their WordPress themes and tools, then this is definitely a resource that will help!

I realize that hosting a blog isn’t necessarily a ‘big deal’ anymore, but I’m always disappointed when the blogs I visit are lame, dull, or full of mindless SEO filler. This definitely isn’t the case with the blog hosted by ThriveThemes.com. In fact, as I was looking over the topics, I bookmarked several of them for my own research purposes!

In Conclusion

If you’re looking to create or improve your own WordPress website, and need to focus more on conversion so that your visitors can start earning you more revenue, then I would definitely consider giving ThriveThemes.com a try. Their themes are awesome, their tools are intuitive, and their website is easy to navigate and use.

Even a complete novice could use these tools—so make sure to check them out before choosing your next plug-in or WordPress toolbox.

Inspired designInspired by popular news readers, the Extranews WordPress theme wow’s your visitors with stunning images for your articles, and gives them a rich experience they will love – and return again for.

Dynamic Headline Loader
Usability is key when it comes to keeping your visitors on your site. Your visitors can quickly find the articles they care about, right from the homepage.

Multiple Review Styles
Like percentages? Points? Or maybe you’re a stars person? You choose the style of your reviews to best suit your audience.

Schema Search Microdata
Schema rich snippets let you get more recognized on search engines, by showing the review right in the results. Search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display or search results.

Is WordPress just for blogging, or can you do more with it? These 5 points will show you why the answer is yes!

Is WordPress just for blogging? I’ve heard this question hundreds of times. Yes, it’s true that back when it was first created, WordPress was designed specifically as a blogging platform—but this definitely isn’t the case nowadays.

Of course, there are some ins and outs to this discussion. While it’s true that WordPress might not have an answer to every web-design conundrum, it’s also true that it can do far more than a lot of people give it credit for.

In this post, we’re going to discuss 5 reasons for why WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore.

Please keep in mind that every website’s needs are different, and that it is possible that WordPress won’t work for yours. But on the other hand, there are literally thousands of tools that have been created specifically to address different needs within the platform—so the odds that you’ll find a way to make it work for you if you try are pretty good!

You can publish any type of content on a WordPress site

One major reason for why WordPress isn’t just for blogging anymore is because you can publish basically anything on it. You can post images, videos, and text, add captions, display documents, offer downloads, and more.

You can even design a storefront and display images of your products for your customers to see, just like any other e-commerce site would enable you to do.

Being able to publish content like this certainly gives WordPress an edge in the website-design realm—and is a big part of why it’s so popular.

Because professionals are using WordPress to create dynamic, professional websites every day

For anyone concerned with the belief that WordPress is just for blogging, I would definitely recommend a look at the WordPress showcase. Some of the sites that have been created with it are nothing short of amazing—and if those companies and people can do it, so can you!

There are a ton of themes that’ll work well for static content

WordPress themes come in all shapes and sizes—and there are definitely some awesome options out there that don’t require you to have a blog at all.

A quick look at the WordPress Theme Repository will show you that there are more than enough different types of themes to satisfy almost any website need. You can seriously do just about anything with WordPress nowadays—and now, blogging isn’t always a requirement.

The idea that WordPress is just for blogging is seriously outdated

To be completely honest, the idea that WordPress was just for blogging was an old notion even as far back as 2013!

The platform has come such a long way now that it’s almost not even in the same category. Yes, WordPress starting as a blogging platform for hobbyists and amateur writers—but nowadays, even top-level businesses sometimes choose to use WordPress to power their websites.

You can do basically anything with a WordPress site

Whether you want to inform, educate, sell, display, or network, WordPress has the plugins, tools, widgets, and themes to get you started and working. Gone are the days when you had to work everything around a blog. Now, you can choose and customize a theme based on what you actually need your site to do—and then work outward from there.

WordPress is Open Source, requires no licensing fees, can be used for any purpose, can be changed or altered to fit your needs and vision, and can be distributed as needed for any reason. It’s a true free software, but it’s also flexible and contains a wealth of resources to help you make your website as good as it can possibly be!

You may still need to buy a custom theme or a few plugins, but this is a small price to pay for the benefits that you’ll receive in terms of flexibility, ease-of-use, and cost-effectiveness.

Some people say that WordPress works fine if you don’t need your website to be ‘serious’ or ‘professional’, but these are also misconceptions. There are a lot of businesses and entrepreneurs that choose to use WordPress, mainly because it offers so much flexibility and has the potential to be customized to just about any extent.

With this platform, your imagination is truly the limit. If you can dream it, then you can probably (at least for the most part) do it with WordPress.